


Room to Talk

by prizewinningfruitcake



Series: Bitten [7]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Sort Of, Templar Carver Hawke, soft sad babies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 11:14:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19829017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prizewinningfruitcake/pseuds/prizewinningfruitcake
Summary: Sometimes you need to work things out and you get a room...in a brothel... to talk.





	Room to Talk

They were meant to talk.

Merrill sits alone in a corner avoiding curious glances and clutching the letter like a receipt, solid proof that she hasn’t dreamed this up herself.

Her legs go numb when he walks in because he looks like him, like Carver, rather than the clanking wall of metal she saw at the Gallows. She thought of him sweating under all that armor and had a little laugh, but he pretended he didn’t see her and her heart sank like a stone. Then finally he wrote to her - to the Hanged Man, care of Varric - and her heart still felt like a stone, but a smooth black one at the bottom of a river.

He slides in across from her and it’s more mundane than it should be, sitting together the way they used to. But they never used to come here.

She decided to let him speak first; he seems to have made the same resolution so they stare at each other silent for a while before he clears his throat and says, “For a second I thought you didn’t come.”

That stings, and she says, “I’ve never left you waiting, have I?” Cold and smooth, like the bottom of a river.

“I… No,” he says, “you haven’t.”

She doesn’t reply, though some distant echo in her head tells her she’s being terribly rude. It isn’t rude, she decides. He’s come to talk so let him talk.

“I just- I don’t like how we left things. Before.”

She’s surprised he’s just come out with it.

“Oh?”

“Well… yes. I-“ he clears his throat. “Were you happy with it?”

“No,” she blurts, but she didn’t mean to let him have it so quickly. “You have something you’d like to say?”

He makes a frustrated sound and shifts in his seat. “But you understand the position I was in,” he says, and she knows now that they’re continuing an old conversation, rather than beginning a new one. “We both said some things we shouldn’t have, but-“

“So that’s why you wanted to talk to me,” Merrill says, familiar heat rising in her chest. “To have me tell you you’re forgiven and I was all wrong.”

“I wasn’t-“

“You’ve made your choice. You can’t have both. I know that better than you, trust me.”

He stares impassive for a moment before he says, “Maybe we should talk somewhere more…”

She nods and he pays for a room. They were meant to talk, but it ended up a bit louder than normal talking. Carver says Templars come here often, to the Rose - they don’t usually take rooms for discussion, she assumes.

“I didn’t want this,” he tells her as he paces along the windowless walls. It’s so dark in here; they’ve been at this for what feels like hours, saying the same things over and over. She’s forgotten what time of day it is. “I wanted to go with my sister - I _wanted_ to join the Guard.“

“You had other choices. You wouldn’t listen.” She sits gripping the edge of the bed. He’s as far from her as the confines of the room will allow. There’s a scraping, pounding noise the room over that she nearly asked about before she realized what it was, and it’s beginning to bother her.

“What? Work on a fishing boat? In the mine? Work myself to death before I’m 30? Easy for you and Marian to talk like I’ve turned down riches to hunt mages, but you don’t know.”

“You think I don’t know anything, but I do. I’ve struggled the same as you.” She rises with that, her voice hard and hot like stone striking stone. He retreats the short distance he has left, his back hitting the wall. He’s quieter when he speaks next.

“I lost every other option. Everything I could have done. I’m asking you to believe that.”

Merrill must admit she doesn’t know anything about the sorts of work someone like Carver could do. To keep the roof over her own head, she mends and sells herbs, little odds and ends. Carver couldn’t do any of that, she supposes, and it wouldn’t go far enough for he and his mother both. He knows how to do washing and mending and all, but for some reason people don’t want to pay a boy to do that. It would be silly to suggest it.

“I could have joined the Guard,” he continues, “but Aveline killed my chance at it. Ask her, she’ll tell you.”

Aveline said he’s too arrogant for her to handle, too defiant for her to trust, and she sounded too much like the Keeper when she said it. “I haven’t spoken to Aveline since you left,” she says. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to. Not that Aveline has even noticed.

For just a moment a smile flickers in his eyes, a barely noticeable muscle twitch, but she would know it anywhere, in any light probably. She didn’t know how much she’d missed that.

“You don’t have to- I mean, not on my…” He’s flustered now, frowning again. “Merrill…” His voice softens and he looks suddenly so tired. She is too; it’s been hard to sleep. “I should have listened to you. I should have waited.”

Hawke returned from the Deep Roads a week and two days after Carver left. The nearness of it feels cruel, personal.

They were meant to talk, but the sob that escapes her throat, uncontrollably, makes it difficult. With his arms around her, one firm around her waist and the other hand holding the back of her head, she can let her knees give out, and she’s thankful for how steady he is even now. 

He says, “I’m sorry,” into the top of her head.

She asks him after they’re lying down together, entangled in the borrowed bed, how it is, or rather she asks, “Is it terrible?”

“No, it’s not too bad. Not too different from being a soldier. Someone with a higher rank than you tells you where to go and what to do, and if you do it well they leave you alone.”

“Oh.” 

That feeling again, like she is sinking and he’s staying in the same place. His chest is sweating where she’s pressed her forehead against it.

“I miss you,” he says.

She ignores the way her heart beats in her throat and between her legs. “You miss all of us, I’m sure.”

“No,” he says and laughs a little. “Just you. The rest of them are on their own.” 

She’s going to cry again, and she doesn’t want to. She swallows it down and draws him in, finds his bare skin under his clothes, slides herself underneath his weight. This is what people use the rooms for here. At least they can say that.

Neither of them says anything; hard to because his mouth hardly leaves hers. After they’ve finished, she holds him there, pressed against her chest and between her legs, until there’s a layer of sweat that feels cold and awful when they try to pull away. They try to go back, but the moment’s passed and it feels sticky and clammy so they gather up their clothes from on the floor and tangled in the sheets. 

And that’s the end of it, though it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t because she has more to say - not much, but a few words that mean a lot. 

He puts his hands behind his back after he’s pulled on his shirt. “I don’t… get to leave on my own often.”

“I know,” she says, though she really has no idea how it works. “You’ll need to see your family.”

He shrugs in response, and she adds, “and it isn’t safe for you to see me.”

“I don’t care.”

She is not so naive to take that answer unquestioning, but she is fool enough not to ask any further. She crosses over to him, reaches up to touch his face and he bends to meet her, puts his hands over hers. 

"Ar lath ma, vhenan,” she says to him, and he knows what that means, but not the same way she does. He doesn’t feel it in the same place, because she didn’t use the words he’s used to. Sometime she will, but not tonight.

He squeezes her tight, tight, the way she had to convince him to when he worried he would hurt her, convince him she was solid enough. “I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

It sounds like a promise, the way he says it, and she wants to believe it so she does. If she has him, the rest doesn’t feel so daunting. The cobbled street outside is still warm from the sun, though it’s long gone down. She lets it flow beneath her feet on the way back home.


End file.
